Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro Review

The Neptune 4 Pro is just one of a rather large stable of Elegoo products, including 4 variants in the 'Neptune 4' line directly. The Pro does have some nice upgrades we appreciate and will highlight below, but even so, it ultimately can't make up for the rest of the 'meh' we ran into around every corner.

Performance Comparison

Print Quality

The bottom line is that we weren't particularly excited about the Neptune's prints. This is strange, considering a few key feature upgrades that directly contribute to the 'Pro' designation here are specifically focused on print quality.

Our standard lineup of testing prints, which we run on every printer as a baseline, tend to be simple designs. However, they are chosen specifically to show clear imperfections and concerns that may be hidden in more complex geometries. What we saw with the 4 Pro were consistent waves and wobbles in what should have been perfectly flat surfaces, prominent seams, and bridging and overhang separations. Clearances between moving parts were tighter than intended and supports held on for dear life during removal.

We should mention that no print outright failed our tests (once the printer was up and running… but more on that in the next metric section). Still, we have no choice but to give the entire lot of prints a solid C grade. Surprisingly, the best print here happened to be what many competitors have challenges with — the vase test. This print is run using special settings to maintain one wall thickness in a consistent spiral from bottom to top.

Ease of Use

On the constructive side, we found that the printer setup went well enough, taking 37 minutes from unboxing to the initial print run. That's when the issues started, though.

Our initial print did fail about 75% of the way through, which we attributed to a loss of connectivity as opposed to bed adhesion, extruder issues, or other hardware-related possibilities. Updating the firmware should have fixed this, but instead, we saw the printer freeze before the next print could even start. Ultimately, after a frustrating correspondence with the support team, we felt that we might have had a lemon on our hands and ordered a second unit to continue testing.

That second unit worked better, but we can't say what can be attributed to bad luck vs. bad engineering in what is supposed to be a premium offering from Elegoo. We were baffled by not being able to get certain standard features to work, such as an advertised auto-leveling bed program, for example.

Print Capabilities

Print capabilities are where the Neptune 4 Pro really should earn its 'Pro' designation relative to the other models in the Neptune lineup. However, we didn't find it always worked up to snuff.

Elegoo claims a bevy of fancy-sounding features, all of which work to varying degrees of success. 'Input shaping and pressure advance' settings in the slicer and a dual-gear direct drive extruder should supposedly combine to make prints as smooth as a baby's bottom. Unfortunately, this was not the case during our tests, at least not with the 'standard' starting settings we try to run all printers with. Additionally, a 500mm/s print rate should put the 4 Pro up there with other speed demons in our lineup, but we found that we had to limit the speed dramatically just to produce passable prints.

On the bright (or hot) side, the extruder is capable of an impressive 300°C maximum temperature, so all sorts of specialty filament materials are available for use with this guy. The build volume is also on the larger side, at 225mm x 225mm x 265 mm (8.86" x 8.86" x 10.43"), giving you more freedom in your print size.

Support

The included manual was fine, but the wealth of further videos and crowdsourced resources we find with many other printers are conspicuously lacking with Elegoo's products. Their warranty is also needlessly granular, covering different parts for varying timeframes.

Customer support is email-based, as Elegoo is a China-based (Shenzhen) Company. Referring back to the firmware/ freezing issues we experienced on the initial setup, we are disappointed to report that working with Elegoo directly to get this resolved was not a great experience. It took us three weeks of back-and-forth communication, and we only got a response every day or two. We had already ordered a second product, received it in-house, and completed testing by the time all was said and done.

Should You Buy the Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro?

Over the course of our testing period, we started to see a trend form across all metrics - mediocrity. But we feel that many of these issues we encountered can absolutely be resolved with some patience and an appetite for tinkering, which would result in an assuredly solid printing companion if you have the patience to make it there. The included bells and whistles are enough to be attractive to a mildly experienced print enthusiast looking to take the next steps with a larger build volume or exotic filaments.

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